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Saturday, February 28, 2015

Winter in my garden

I choose leaves as my theme for this years serie. I have already worked with leaves as a leaf was one of the objects I used during my C&G course, my second assesment quilt was based on leaves and I used the gingko leaves for my silent theme quilt a while ago.
So when I discovered we had to work with green for this quilt I was relieved. Blue might have been more challenging for my theme.
I decided against appliqueing green leaves on a background and so making a quilt similar to my second C&G quilt.
I recently read an article in Art Quilting Studio about discharge printing with leaves and decided to try this technique on my first quilt. I used different dry-pressed leaves I had collected in our garden in the past years. They are the same that can be used for the sunprinting technique Nicole recently described on this blog.
I cut several pieces of different commercial hand-dyied green fabrics, applied a thin cot of discharge past on the side of a leaf I tought would show more details (veins) and carefully pressed he leaf to the fabric and left it there for a moment. after peeling back the leaf I let the fabric dry and then ironed it. This was like opening a present as it was then I discovered how the print had turned out.

As the fabric I choose is not very dark the discharge effect looks more like a shadow or to me like a ghost image of a leaf.
I was afraid that piecing the different prints would add strong lines to the quilt I put the pieces of fabric onto the batting and left the edges raw.

I free-motion quilted around the leaves but not inside as I wanted to keep this ghost image feeling..
I only quilted some curved lines into the background as I didn't want the background quilting to distract from the leaves.

I decided on the title winter in my garden for this quilt as at this time of the year all the leaves are missing and here are only there ghosts.

6 comments:

You really have gone green! I agree with Julia that this really is a very interesting technique which gives such lovely results. Printing/discharging different leaves on different shaded green patches gives the piece a very harmonic feeling.

About Latitude Quilts

Latitude Quilts is a group of textile artists from around the world who came together through the internet. For the past two years, 2012 -2014, we each created a 15" x 15" piece of artwork based on a common group theme. This year, 2015, we are changing the format and each member will be producing 4 quilts per year based on their own theme but each quilt will follow a challenge theme set by one of our members. Challenge themes will be a design principal or style. The results will be posted here on "Reveal Day" at the end of February, May, August and November. Each of us are enjoying exploring our art with the support and critique of other members.